This is the dream and this is the dreamer for five minutes
A crazy poem…and explaining the poem…
by Jon Rappoport
February 21, 2017
Whenever I need to remind myself of the essentials, I return to these things:
Poems.
Poems that disassemble reality.
Poems that take apart the machine.
Why not?
I’m walking up Broadway past the print houses and the owl houses and the pool room and the steamships and the tide rushing out leaving an octopus stranded looking around to understand this new planet
I’m walking past a glass and steel triangle and a copper dome and a stand of fruit on the sidewalk and a powder blue Cadillac mumbling old church hymns
I’m walking up Broadway past a row of theaters and an old clock on the side of a tan brick colossus
women in high heels with skinny legs
luminous machine-bankers
Parisian men wearing straw hats rowing small boats in the blue-ink canals
I’m lying back in a leather chair in Grand Central Station and an old man is cutting my hair
he puts a hot white towel on my face
I enter St. Pat’s, it’s a huge bookie joint, crowds standing in the aisles, betting on anti-Lucifer
I take a seat at the end of a long pew and fold my hands in prayer to Piero della Francesca, silver painter of Solomon & Sheba
and Henry Miller of the Rosy Crucifixion and Kenneth Patchen in his bed of pain and Gregory Corso roaming the streets of Rotterdam
blessings of wine and bread and skeletons growing new flesh
…walking up Broadway at dusk, melting into the crowds, reading their money minds, worshiping the sun veined with purple roses, a department store dream, marble floors, silent limousines waiting at the curb
I’m walking past four-armed genetic heralds and sad androids and murderous shoe salesmen from the 1950s, velvet furniture, apples too red to be real, false blood, reporters lapping up fumes, idolatrous cellophane ghosts in the park, moon over old Hoboken, broken planks on the dock
savage lulubells bloom in cartoon park and westerly winds, an ice landing full of chimes and lopsided sunrise, heroic mahogany symphony on walls of scribbled gilded breath, ornate redemption of vehicles
I walk past Hantu Raya balloons and prelude war parade glittering confetti, Bowery brown and gray men scattered out on the dismal sidewalk
piers of giant locks and hasps, through tunnels of rotting rain, into the cobblestone wind
last slanted rays on green vines, stolen by the Church from nature, stolen by nature from an unknown poet
the escape into furniture, the soul over and over again
The heralds sang, the disputed heaven tottered and broke through the clouds
Why not?
What is the addiction to reality?
To the machine?
Loosen the cords.
Take a ride on the elevated trolley…
“But I don’t understand that ‘poem’ you wrote…I don’t understand a thing in it…”
“That’s all right…did anything kick off a spark, just one…”
“Well maybe could be…the powder blue Cadillac and the stolen by nature from an unknown poet…”
“Have you ever had a dream where you walked through a landscape that was more real than waking life…”
“Sure, everybody has. I was in a mall that reminded me of some kind of moonscape. It was super-real, and when I woke up I felt…refreshed…like I’d taken a bath in energy…”
“Well, that’s how I felt when I wrote that crazy poem…”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“But I mean, it doesn’t make any sense…”
“Can’t you take a quick vacation from making ordinary sense?”
“Is that allowed?”
“Who is supposed to allow it?”
“Don’t know…”
“Is there a king who decides what makes sense?”
“Everybody decides all together…”
“You mean they meet in a room and have a conference?”
“Well no…”
“I think secretly you understood the poem…”
“No, no, no…”
“Why not?”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“Who said so?”
“If I understood it, I’d be crazy…”
“You weren’t crazy in that moonscape dream.”
“But that was just a dream.”
“The poem is a kind of dream. You can think of it that way.”
“I can?”
“Absolutely. I give you permission.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a dispenser of wide-ranging allowances. I’m a vacation expert. I give you a poem that’s a five-minute vacation from the machine…”
“Why?”
“Just for the hell of it.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Who gave you that job?”
“The Pope.”
“Who?”
“I met with the Pope and he said it was okay.”
“You’re messing with me.”
“Okay, it wasn’t the Pope. It was me. I gave myself permission.”
“Just a five-minute vacation?”
“That’s all. And then you can go back to what you were doing.”
“I lay down a book called reality and I pick up another book for five minutes.”
“That’s right.”
“Maybe I could do that.”
“I believe you could.”
“I could sort of act like I was crazy for five minutes.”
“If you want to think of it that way.”
“I could just climb out on a limb and jump off…”
“Sure. If you want to think of it that way.”
“I could pretend I was walking around on the moon for five minutes.”
“Why not?”
“I could pretend I understood the poem.”
“Yes, pretend you did. Pretend you do.”
“Fake it.”
“Exactly. Fake it.”
“Well, why didn’t you say that? I know how to fake it.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I fake it most of the time. I mean, I sort of fake things so I can understand them. First, I fake it. Then I get into what I’m faking. It’s like acting. It’s like being in a play.”
“Of course. You’re in a play and you’re playing a character who understands the poem. Why not?”
“And then I leave the play and I go back to being me.”
“Sure. It’s up to you.”
“I can invent whatever I want to for five minutes.”
“Nobody would stop you.”
“Well, I can think of a few people who would stop me.”
“Which people?”
“The Washington Post and a psychiatrist.”
“You mean the Washington Post would run a page-one headline with your name in it and it would say: THIS MAN IS CRAZY.”
“It could happen.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“You think the Washington Post cares.”
“It’s possible.”
“I’ll bet you a thousand dollars they don’t run the headline.”
“You think I’m nuts? I wouldn’t take that bet.”
“The Washington Post won’t know you understand the poem. Trust me.”
“You’re sure.”
“Positively.”
“Okay. I understand the poem.”
“See? That was easy.”
“I mean I can pretend I understand it.”
“Good. It’s just a five-minute vacation.”
“I can do that.”
“I know you can.”
“I throw the rules out the window.”
“Right.”
“It’s a relief.”
“I know.”
“Why are the reality rules there in the first place?”
“It’s foolish, isn’t it?”
“Suppose I invent a new reality for myself?”
“I wouldn’t stop you.”
“Who would?”
“Nobody…”
“Why are you having this conversation with me?”
“You’re having this conversation with yourself. I’m just egging you on a little…”
“You’re stimulating me.”
“If you want to think of it that way.”
“It’s an interesting poem.”
“I like it.”
“Why?”
“I just do.”
“You promise you won’t tell anybody that I stopped being ordinary me for five minutes?”
“I promise.”
“Because my whole reputation could be ruined.”
“I promise.”
“People would say I went off the rails.”
“No one will know.”
“This conversation never happened.”
“Never.”
“I’m sane. Always was, always will be.”
“You bet.”
“I’m an ordinary person trying to understand something that isn’t ordinary for five minutes. That’s as far as I’m willing to go.”
“Understood.”
“Reality is ordinary all the way down. It couldn’t be otherwise.”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay. Now get out of here. I don’t want anybody watching me while I fake it and pretend something makes sense that makes no sense.”
“I’m gone.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Outside the Reality Machine 
It was a great dream…
Ah, … much better. Just have to switch off and let go. Perhaps you saw me at the edge of your awareness. Thought I saw you. Sort of hard to tell…I was in a reality of my own making and our realities may have intersected briefly and ever so slightly out of phase. It’s like when you think you see something in the dark and when you turn to look, it disappears. Even stranger still is the seeming discontinuity of the time illusion. You wrote this a while ago, yet I just read it and still I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse … maybe. Time? We don’t need no stinking “time”. Consciousness knows no such limit. Like I said … just let go. And while I visited the world in your poem/my interpretation I was reminded of a couple other places I’ve been. For a brief few minutes, I was in three places at once and not “here”. Just let go … don’t grasp. Let go … quit trying to grab hold of “reality”. It’s an illusion anyway. Just let go … drift.
I remember having to analyze poems in high school. Honors English – we were the smarter ones, so we were expected to be able to find meaning in literature and write about it. Of course, you had to write your impressions in prose. Funny, we never were asked to write our own poetry. They wanted to train analysts, knowledge people, explainers, not imagination people. If wish I could say like Paul Simon in his song “Kodachrome”, “My life of education hasn’t hurt me none …”
“But dreams aren’t real.”
“Of course they are.”
Gorgeous, Jon!
(Where’s my black beret?)
❤️💕😊👍